Drones Took Front and Center Stage at the Winter Olympics in Milan Cortina

The 2026 Winter Olympics in Milan and Cortina put us in the action

This year, drones have taken center stage. Not the quiet, distant kind hovering politely overhead.

These are fast, nimble FPV drones that dive down ski runs, chase snowboarders through powder, and skim the ice alongside bobsleds. For the first time, watching winter sports actually feels fast.

For decades, Olympic coverage meant long lenses and helicopter shots. Beautiful, sure. But distant. Now the camera drops into the action. It banks when the skier banks. It feels the pitch of the slope. It rides the line.

While we on TV could hear the buzz of the drone overhead, the athletes wearing helmets and plummeting down hills could not.

Rigorous testing was done to ensure that the drones didn’t distract the athletes or interfere with their event.

The result was visceral. You can almost sense the cold air and the edge of steel carving into ice as the olympians did their events.

And more importantly, it gives the athletes justice. These competitors spend their lives chasing hundredths of a second, committing fully to risk, gravity, and precision.

A static camera flattens that ambition. This new perspective honors it. You finally see how steep the slope really is. How tight the turns are. How little room there is for error.

The drones helped give some added (and needed) perspective to those of us watching from afar.

What did you think of the new perspectives that the drones offered this year?

Images © Cameron Spencer / Hannah Peters / Getty Images & NBC Olympics.

You might also like: Fly Through One of the World’s Largest Waterfalls • Haiti’s Olympic Uniform Design That Carries a Nation • This Inventor Created a Drone Umbrella